


stuck in an elevator

by BlackVultures



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Claustrophobia, Episode Related, First Kiss, Fluff, Humor, M/M, men having feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-13
Updated: 2014-03-13
Packaged: 2019-08-04 12:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16346552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackVultures/pseuds/BlackVultures
Summary: Exactly what you get from the title. A silly almost-tag I wrote for 4.06, when we (and Steve) discover that Danny is claustrophobic.





	stuck in an elevator

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Pulled this one out of my "unfinished fics" folder and cleaned it up, decided I'd share. My molars felt like they were swimming in sugar water while I wrote it. Hope you like!
> 
> (This work is a backdated repost from my old Archive account!)

“I can’t believe this,” Danny said as he and Steve waited for the elevator at the mall. “It’s an  _escalator_ , Steven—the worst thing that happens on an escalator is that it stops halfway up and you climb it like stairs.” He shook his head. “Wait, scratch that, I  _can_  believe this, because it’s you. I just can’t believe I’m going along with it.”

Steve looked at him and frowned. “I didn’t like how it sounded. It was grinding.”

“Oh, and riding in a metal death box is better?” Danny flapped his hands at the object in question as the doors opened, letting out a group of kids all clutching Build-a-Bears. “How is that? Explain it to me.”

“How about you explain to me why we’re here in the first place and not picking up a twelve-pack for Cath’s party?”

“I did that already, at length, on the way here,” Danny replied, reaching across Steve to press the button for the third floor once they were inside. “It’s a  _woman’s_  housewarming party, ergo you can’t just show up with Longboards. It’s simple—we go to Crate and Barrel, buy a nice vase, in and out in fifteen minutes, and  _then_  we go get the beer.”

The elevator jerked and started its ascent, but Danny wasn’t counting on making it up—this mall was notorious for shit breaking down and should’ve been flagged for not being up to code. To take his mind off the possible plunge to his doom, he shoved his hands in his pockets and went for casual when he asked, “So why’d Catherine move out, anyway? Thought things between you guys were good.”

Steve made a face—Medium Aneurysm, to be precise. “She said she needed some space and that we should see other people.”

“Ah.” One night last week, Steve had a meeting with the governor and Chin had taken off early, so Danny and Cath had gone out together for burgers and beers. It had been fun, and Danny had gotten comfortable and had that third beer when he shouldn’t have, and therefore had been completely blindsided when Catherine asked him if he was in love with his partner.

And maybe he had made a grievous but extremely sincere error in admitting the truth. She had been strangely understanding about it, and when he had asked her how long she’d known and she’d told him  _since the first time I saw you guys together_ , Danny had let his head hit the table and wondered how the hell this was his life. “Sorry to hear that.”

Steve nodded. “Thanks.” There was a pause, and then he blurted out, “Seriously, what does she think I’m gonna do? I mean, we work together and we work  _all the time_ —how am I supposed to—”

The elevator made a hideous grinding noise—much like the one Steve had accused the escalator of having—and shuddered to a stop between floors, trapping them inside. The lights flickered and died a second later, the darkness mitigated only by the red battery-powered emergency lights that came on reluctantly.

“Jesus, really?” Steve punched various numbered buttons on the panel but they were unresponsive. He found the emergency one and held it down so the fire department would be alerted to the situation. “Guess you were right about the elevator thing, Danno.” He waited for a jibe but it didn’t come. All he could hear was rapid breathing. “Danny?”

Danny was busy concentrating on not passing out from the dizzying sensation of the blood leaving his head as his vision grayed out at the edges. His heart had started racing and when he flexed his fingers his palms were sweaty. “Steve? You remember when I told you I was a tiny bit claustrophobic?”

Steve blinked, eyes adjusting to the dim, blood-colored light. “Yeah, ‘course I do. I thought it was weird that I didn’t know.” He reached out on impulse when Danny doubled over suddenly, hands on his knees, hand curling around his shoulder. “But we’ve ridden in elevators before—”

“That’s… different,” Danny gritted out, trying to slow his breathing. He was sort of surprised that Steve touching him didn’t make the reaction worse, but then again, it was  _Steve_ —and for all Danny bitched about, Steve was as much of a reassurance as he was a crazy person. “Those were moving elevators—this one isn’t going anywhere, so it’s like… a cage I can’t get out of.”

Steve ran his free hand through his hair; he’d never seen Danny like this before and it was freaking him out more than he wanted to admit. “I’ll get you out, just hang on.” He tried the doors first, sliding his fingers into the gap in the middle, spreading his feet, and using his weight to aid him in pushing them apart. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies, and the result wasn’t the same either—instead of the doors to the next floor being visible above them, all Steve saw was concrete. “Shit.”

Danny leaned against the wall, cursing himself for this weakness. He was a grown man and a cop, for God’s sake—he had one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and the thing that left him vulnerable was a small space? When he was a kid he’d hoped he would outgrow it… but thinking about being a kid threw him straight back to the incident that started it all, and he didn’t feel his legs go out from underneath him so much as he realized he was falling.

“Danny!” Steve caught Danny before he could hit the floor, arms locking around his partner’s solid torso. He was shuddering involuntarily, and Steve ran a hand up his back, lips close to his ear. “Hey, hey—I’ve got you.”

Danny let out a shaky breath, hands coming up to bunch the fabric of Steve’s shirt. “Damn it,” he whispered harshly, blinking back the tears that burned his eyes, glad that it was just dark enough for them not to be visible. He was the furthest thing from a delicate flower, so this was beyond frustrating. “Damn it, Steve, I’m sorry—”

“Hey, look at me,” Steve said. “Danno, look at me.” He hesitated for a second before bringing his hand up and cupping Danny’s jaw, getting him to tilt his head up. He leaned down and looked him in the eye. “Nothing to be sorry for. Just give me a second, okay? I can fix this.”

Danny nodded, his stubble grazing Steve’s palm, and in that moment something odd passed between them, something that had done so before, but usually the situation was too death-defying for either of them to notice. It wasn’t the typical electricity or on-and-off flirting that flowed between them, but something raw and intense. It was trust, yeah, but more than that—it ran deeper, stronger—and before Danny figured out what he was going to do, Steve was bridging the gap between them and pressing his lips to Danny’s.

Danny was sure he had to be hallucinating from lack of oxygen or something, because this was not happening. There was no way he was actually kissing Steve McGarrett, the pain in the ass who endangered his life on an hourly basis, but smiled at him with those stupid eye-crinkles and got them out of it; the guy that Danny had written off as straight and unattainable from day one; the goddamn guy that Grace adored almost as much as Danny did and who loved her right back. This couldn’t really be happening, but in case it was, Danny wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass him by.

Arms wrapping around Steve’s neck, Danny stood on his toes and returned the somewhat chaste kiss, tentatively licking the seam of his lips and making a pleased sound in the back of his throat when Steve let him in, hands splayed against Danny’s lower back. It was sweet and smooth, but eventually they had to breathe—and that was when Danny realized he  _could_  breathe, that the space in the elevator didn’t seem so tight, like it was going to crush him if he didn’t watch out.

Steve was staring at him through his ridiculously thick eyelashes, the look in his eyes difficult to read and far away.

Danny didn’t want to ruin the moment—he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get another one—but he wasn’t sure how long his newfound immunity would last. Unwinding his arms, he took a step back and said, “I’m good. Do your thing.”

Steve snapped back to himself and nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

He let go slowly, fingers dragging against Danny’s sides before he stepped to the middle of the elevator. Then Steve looked up at the ceiling tiles overhead, tensed briefly, and jumped up, smashing one of them with his forearm and knocking open the maintenance hatch behind it. He looked at Danny and raised his eyebrows. “See? No problem.”

“Uh huh.” Danny eyed the hatch, which was only a foot or so above Steve’s head but just a wee bit higher for him. He decided not to think about how they could go from macking on each other to business as usual in less than ten seconds. “And how am I supposed to reach that?”

Steve crouched down, shoulders rolled forward—and the bastard was  _grinning_. “Hop on.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “I swear you live to drive me insane.” He came over anyway and latched onto Steve’s back—those muscles felt as good as they looked, that had to be illegal—knees bracketed on either side of his body. “Happy?”

“Thrilled,” Steve said with a grunt, sucking in a breath through his nose before he stood, fully supporting Danny’s weight. “Wow, okay—can you reach it, and have you thought about laying off the malasadas?”

Danny was in the process of hauling himself through the opening and paused long enough to give Steve the finger. Then he made it up and out, belly flopping without grace onto the top of the elevator. Squirming around and swearing under his breath, he wrapped a hand around some kind of mechanism and stuck the other one for Steve down to take. “Come on, Rambo—being on top of this thing is only a marginal improvement over being in it. Oh, and by the way, I was right.”

“About what?” Steve’s big hand curled around Danny’s and he folded his body inward as he climbed through the hatch.

“We should have taken the escalator, and from now on that is  _exactly_  what we’re going to do.”

Steve paused. “So there’s no elevator sex in our future, then?”

Danny nearly choked on his tongue and punched Steve in the arm when he noticed he was grinning again. “You bring up my weight again and there will be no sex, period, end of story.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Steve’s brow furrowed briefly, and he shook his head as he slid his fingers between the doors to the next level of the mall. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing—I’m just wondering exactly how long we’ve been married without knowing it.”

“Maybe  _you_  didn’t know it,” Danny countered, and thought briefly of Kono and Chin’s endless teasing over the years and how long it had taken him to figure it out for himself. “The kids never let me forget.”

 

~***~

 

One city inspector screaming at a disgruntled mall manager, a free vase and a short detour later, Danny and Steve made it to Catherine’s new place, which was a stone’s throw away from where her shore leave rental had been.

Cath answered the door a few moments after Steve rang the bell looking beautiful as always, a bottle opener in one hand. “Hey, you two—glad you could make it!”

She gave them both a kiss on the cheek and Danny hoped fervently that the extra cologne they’d splashed on was enough to mask the scent of a couple of rushed hand jobs in the back of the Camaro. By the knowing wink she shot his way, though, he was pretty sure it wasn’t.

Steve smiled at her and handed over the Crate & Barrel bag. “Here, Cath—happy housewarming.”

“Oh, you guys didn’t have to do this,” Catherine said in a tone that suggested she was pleased. As soon as she pulled the vase from the bag, Danny knew he had been right about the blue-and-white pattern and silently thanked Rachel for dragging him along on the occasional household-related shopping trip. “It’s beautiful—thank you so much, both of you.”

She set it on a table by the front window as Chin walked in. He nodded at them in greeting, but there was a crease between his brows as he opened his mouth to speak.

Both remembering what Catherine had been holding when she let them in, Steve and Danny were already heading back toward the car when Chin called after them, “Fellas, where’s the beer?”


End file.
